Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
has noted that owning a car makes the probability of using it for daily activities
(including commuting) much higher, even if it does not provide any economic
bene
ts and an appropriate public transport connection exists. Then, the public
transport will be used only under rare circumstances (journey to the city centre, to a
party etc.). Additionally the car is shared also by other members of the family,
either as passengers for journeys to work, school (ridesharing) or as drivers for their
own needs (carsharing). So, the decrease of public transport use is higher than the
average for one person. Each new car in a family substitutes about 200
250 local
journeys by public transport per family and year. This effect is more signi
-
cant in
case of the
first car and smaller for additional cars. Therefore, policies aimed at
discouraging car ownership with activities such as high registration fees or annual
excise duties, hoping to reduce the share of car use for trips to work. Unsurpris-
ingly, GDP per capita is also positively correlated with car share. Also other more
or less signi
cant individual factors have in
fl
uence on
final mode choice such as
ecological
lifestyle, subjective perception of public transport, personal
image,
comfort of travelling etc.
Socio-economic and other subjective factors have been found to be very
important in explaining commuting behaviour. Nevertheless, land use is considered
as equally important factor for
final mode choice and has a clear relationship with
travel behaviour [
4
]. Following seven main dimensions of land use factors have
been identified: (1) density; (2) diversity/mixed use; (3) design and infrastructure
(including parking, and conditions for walking and cycling), (4) destination
accessibility; (5) accessibility to public transport; (6) demand management; and
(7) demographics [
6
,
7
].
In this paper, we compare the demand and supply of two transport modes
—
public and individual
in relation to commuting in the Czech Republic. The goal is
to answer three questions: (1) Where are the main areas/
—
ows using individual
transport? (2) What kind of commuters is travelling here? (3) Do they have any
alternative in public transport use? The demand is based on the data from census
2011 and characterized as real modal-split used for commuting between a pair of
municipalities. By contrast, the majority of the existing Czech geographical studies
on commuting mode choice have been conducted based on data from census 2001
without consideration whether any alternative exists, i.e. [
8
fl
14
]. We add another
perspective and utilise our data from the database of public transport connections
(described below). Combining these two data sources we classify municipalities
into several categories based on the level of real public transport use for commuting
(demand) and the number of municipalities accessible by public transport (supply).
Additionally we select the typical members of the most extreme groups considering
various aspects. The remainder of this paper is organised as follows: Sect.
2
describes the data used; Sect.
3
presents the commuting modal-split; Sect.
3.1
describes the supply of public transport connections; Sect.
4
presents the results of
combining both data sources and
-
finally; Sect.
4
summarises the main
findings.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search